UC Merced PhD students, Patrice Cobb and Nicole Zelinksy, have been awarded fellowships by the University of California Educational Evaluation Center. The Center's Research on Evaluation Student Paper Competition invited UC graduate students to submit research proposals for studies in the field of education evaluation. A total of four awards were made, two of which went to UC Merced. Patrice and Nicole, both first-year students in the Quantitate Psychology PhD program, will use these awards to support their research endeavors at UC Merced.
Patrice's research examines studies that use single-case designs. Traditionally, researchers have relied heavily on visual analysis of graphs to interpret the results of these studies. Although several statistical analyses have recently been proposed for single case design studies, these methods all assume either no trend or a linear trend in the data. Patrice is working on nonlinear methods for modeling these data from single-case designs.
Nicole's research focuses on publication bias in single-case designs. Studies that do not find a treatment effect are less likely to be published, something frequently referred to as publication bias. If literature summaries such as meta-analyses fail to include unpublished negative results, then these meta-analyses may overestimate the size of treatment effects. However, little is currently known about publication bias in the context of single-case designs. Nicole will attempt to identify the effect size below which researchers are reluctant to publish single-case designs and use this to create a model of publication bias for this type of study.
